I just completed a voyage on M/V Volendam, but I think this comment will apply also to other HAL ships. Internet access is offered in two ways: via terminals in the internet café near the coffeeshop on deck 5, but also for laptops and netbooks via wifi hotspots at different marked locations and even in cabins (I had excellent reception in my cabin, located near the bow on deck 2). In both cases one uses an account offered by a third-party satellite internet-provider. Unfortunately, the rates per minute are high, and the satellite connection is slow. Following the advice on other forums I therefore used my web mail to first clean out my inbox of unwanted messages; then went out of web mail and fired up my mailer to download the remaining messages; which I then read off-line, after quickly logging off. This worked fine for incoming mail, but outgoing mail presented a problem, because the connection was too slow, apparently, to complete the login procedure for my POP3 account. The solution I found was to compose outgoing messages in Wordpad; copy those to the buffer with ctrl-C; open the internet connection and go into web mail; and drop the text of my message from the buffer into an outgoing message with ctrl-V. And then logoff right away of course. This saved a lot of money. Hope this is useful, possibly also for other ships and cruise lines.

penny3333

03-18-2010 01:32 PM

Hi kooijman, welcome to Cruise-Chat and welcome home http://bestsmileys.com/waving/7.gif Thank you for your helpful hints. We hope you will visit our board often. Best wishes!